Hi T.J.,
On 9 Jun 2010, at 15:57, T.J. Crowder wrote:
[snip]
> What I wrote was:
>
>> FWIW, completely agree that there must be one specification for
>> HTML5. Unless the W3C is prepared to step back and let the WhatWG
>> take ownership, that spec must be "owned" by the W3C. Pages like
>> this one [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
>> multipage/] are very confusing. I've seen it cited in online
>> discussions as "the HTML5 standard" (and why shouldn't someone
>> think it was? It says "draft standard" on it).
>> The work of the WhatWG is extremely important, it has driven and
>> continues to drive this process forward where HTML had been under-
>> and mis-specified for years. That work needs to be credited and
>> honored, but as HTML5 is becoming the new baseline, there needs to
>> be a single definitive source of normative information about it,
>> with other sources of draft proposals (not standards, not
>> specifications)
You don't mean "not specifications" do you? It's hard to see how you
can propose something without providing a specification of what you
propose.
>> very, very clearly labelled as such.
>
>
> Having a competing "specification" is a sure route to fracture and
> failure. I hope no one wants that. Those of us relying on these
> standards certainly don't.
There are two HTML 4 standards, the W3C "recommendation" and ISO/IEC
15445:2000(E):
http://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/15445/15445.html
Some purists might insist that only the latter is a standard :), but
there are definitely two specifications. Now, editorially, the ISO
spec is a "diff by ref" spec, so there are some differences. But note
that the ISO spec is more restrictive than the W3C one.
If the WHATWG spec remains a superset, then I think the likely
*technical* fragmentation reasonably can be seen as fairly minimal.
Whether there are significant social/marketing issues, well, I guess
the real question is *how* significant they are. That I don't know.
People regularly get quite concerned about things like working drafts
and the messages they send and fait accomplis, etc. But I don't think
they tend to have widespread or severe negative effects.
Cheers,
Bijan.